Blindspot: Things are already getting out of hand in "Hero Fears Imminent Rot"

Last week, Jane was kidnapped by Sandstorm, Reade was told he had memories he didn't know, and Weller and Nas butted heads. Things are only worse this week! Spoilers ahead for Blindspot (S0203) "Hero Fears Imminent Rot"...

We're three episodes into the season and all I can think whenever they're not running around and shooting things is "man, literally everyone on this show needs a hug before they snap!" How long can they go on like this? Is it possible for a whole team to have heart attacks in their thirties? The paranoia alone is getting to me, and I'm not even in the show!

Jane wakes up in some undisclosed location and finds out that Sandstorm has heard from Kade, who has been out of town in Venezuela for longer than she was kept in the CIA hole, making her story void. She holds her own in the argument, but Shepherd wants her to prove her loyalty, and she hands her and Roman a hit order: kill this guy who pre-mind-wipe Jane had gotten to fall in love with her so they could steal some microchip they need for Phase Two. He's balking, and he's not an asset anymore.

They go. Jane talks the guy out of his panic room, because she's been gone for months and the second he sees her and her "psycho brother", he knows something is up and he locks himself in. They beat him up, beat up the security guards activating the panic room brings in, and take the dude into the woods. Nas told Jane to do whatever she needed to do to keep her cover, and everyone keeps telling her she's a cold-blooded killer, but Jane doesn't feel like one, despite having that deep-down body-memory that makes her want to shoot everything whenever she raises her gun.

She's doubting who she is BIG TIME, but Dr Borden tells her to trust her instincts. So far, her instincts have made her really good but not a monster; she's obviously having issues believing that that's not what she is, though, and Zapata says she's off her game.

Anyway, in the woods, she doesn't want to have to kill the asset. She wants to set him back on track to get them the chip they need, but Roman says that's not the mission, and he shoots the guy when she won't. He's disappointed and says she failed the test; he takes her back to the FBI and tells her to wait for a beep on her pager (because Sandstorm is both super high tech and also straight out of 1992?) and where to meet when it goes off.

She's sure she's been burned.

Meanwhile, everything is literally and metaphorically exploding around them.

There's a mad bomber blowing up people related to a weapons teasting ground where the local population has been getting insanely high numbers of cancer deaths. Two guys who lost loved ones--a sister from one and a daughter from the other--are trying to force the government to stop it, publically admit to and apologise for what they've been doing, and shut down the program for real. They get two locations before Jane gets back from her loyalty test (Weller was flipping out that she was missing but Nas insisted that she's fine and this is what they want).

Weller was also flipping out because of the news that he's going to be a dad, when all he can think about is his mom saying "you're just like your father" in light of what he knows his father did. They track the bombers to a park where they take out one, and while Zapata and Reade literally shoot a bomb to pieces to make sure it doesn't explode, Weller catches up with the other bomber and goes into a hostage situation unarmed and actually puts on the suicide vest when the guy tells him to.

See, the stress is already making them insane.

He's talking the guy down, telling him to think about all the family that would miss his hostages the way he misses his sister, and he's almost through to him...when Nas sharp-shoots the guy in the chest with a sniper rifle. Like a boss. Or like a creepy weirdo we can't trust, who keeps steering the team in directions they don't like while insisting that they're a vitally important unit and can't be broken up. Is she insisting on that too much now? She wanted Jane in the field regardless of her mental state, but after she comes back from the test, Weller told her to sit this one out, so she wasn't there when Nas shot the guy who might have told them more about...whatever is going on. Was she silencing someone who could clarify some of the stuff she's obsessed with so that she can maintain control? Is she the mole?

Who knows!

But her methods are pretty brutal and her motives are fuzzy at best, and we know for a fact that she's spying on everyone and they don't have a clue.

The B-plots are also going bonkers.

Zapata is back to being mad at Jane all the time, even though she sort of apologised to her at the end of last episode. But she's turned her constant questioning on Reade this time, who is sympathising with Jane because now he knows that he too has a chunk of missing time in his memories. Freddie told him he was one of the kids their old football coach molested, too, and he doesn't remember it--and doesn't want to, because he's terrified of what it means if he does. He finally admits all this to Zapata and she hugs him, and man, do these people need more hugs. But his problem is still there, and he doesn't know if he wants to go into the heavy therapy it'd take to get those memories back. Does he want to be the best witness for the case that's falling apart for lack of witnesses, or does he want to maintain his mental and emotional balance?

And Borden and Patterson are both being adorably terrible about dating. Patterson agreed to go out with him, but the closer it gets the more she freaks out, and she cancels twice before he just brings the food into the office and she kisses him. They're super cute together; if Nas isn't the mole, I really hope it's not him--or that the team's collective awesomeness can make him switch sides and be THEIR mole to help Jane out, because DANG she needs some relief.

After the bombings are taken care of, Jane tells Weller that she's being pulled in too many directions; he and Nas can't keep giving her opposite and mutually exclusive orders. And he agrees with her. With some of his old tenderness, he asks her what she needs to make this work instead of making excuses or promises or continuing to punish her for not being who they both thought she was. It's kind of beautiful, and it takes her off guard. And this is what makes Kurt Weller such an interesting character. He's got that alpha-male mess going on, but he's got an equally large amount of this need to take care of people, and he still cares about Jane, and he's super worried about this whole situation she's trapped in even more than the rest of them are.

He tells her that she knows who she is, and says what Borden did, that she should trust her instincts. But before things can get more emotional than that, the pager goes off. She meets the Sandstorm driver who puts her in the trunk to take her to another undisclosed location where she's ready to fight, like, everyone, only to find out that Roman covered for her. He said she killed the guy even though he did, and it's obvious that he's lost faith in her. He tells her about the rabbits their old murder-factory orphanage gave them and had them kill, and how he couldn't kill his so they made it bleed out slowly to punish him for his weakness. He says he can't cover for her again, things are about to get very serious very fast, and if she can't find the "real Remy" fast enough herself, he's going to "find her rabbit and make it bleed."

And we all know her rabbit is Weller (and maybe the team). Everyone always threatening Weller, and he doesn't even know it. If he wasn't such a BAMF, he'd be the damsel in distress in this story.

So they're convinced that she's on their side now, but Roman knows the truth and is both super brutal and super unstable, so she can't count on him to hide it for long. Nas wants her to just gleefully kill people if that's what Shepherd wants her to do, but she grew a conscience when she became Jane and she doesn't want to be a killer again. Weller wants to help her but doesn't know what to do, and is still weirded out by not knowing her like he thought he did. No one has yet told Jane that they didn't turn her over to the CIA willingly. The team is together--but it's not on even ground and everyone has their own things to deal with. There was only two bright points: Zapata pointing out that they need to not keep secrets from each other because that only caused trouble last season, and Patterson and Borden being super sweet.

Shepherd has Jane say some words over a memoral for Oscar, since they still don't know that it was Jane who killed him, and there's a really neat intercutting as she speaks so that we're clear that she's talking about Weller and the team, not about Oscar and Sandstorm, but what she says sounds like a loyalty speech to her so-called family. She's getting good at double-speak, despite still being so unhappy about the whole thing.

This show will be the death of us, guys. The emotional pitch is high enough to shatter glass, no one can be trusted but everyone wants someone to trust, and the who's-good-who's-bad-ness is entirely in the grey areas where nothing is clear. Our poor team in stuck in the middle, trying to do their best, and not even trusting their own best mission--the tattoos--because they all come from the same enemies they're trying to take down.

Bring on next week!

More notes on Blindspot 2.3 "Hero Fears Imminent Rot":

Okay, look, Shepherd: YOU are the one who drugged YOUR OWN DAUGHTER so hard she lost her memory and became a different person. Now you're gonna be all "we don't know if we can truuuuuussssttt youuuuuuu" about it?? The longer the show goes on, the less that particular hook holds up.

Is Kade really in Venezuela? Because if so, he's not as dead as they thought after their showdown last season, and that's gonna cause some issues.

Weller is constantly flipping out over what they're making Jane do, but always when Jane's not around to see it, so she still thinks he doesn't like her anymore.

How did Sandstorm know about the bombings? Were they planned that far in advance? Were they coaching these two grief-stricken dudes into doing it? Maybe that's how they've done all of it: orchestrate the events they'd already tattooed on Jane's body, but in such a way that it looks unrelated. Last episode, Nas showed Jane the web of consequences from each of their cases; who's benefitting from exposing all this stuff?

We know what Jane needs. Right before she was tranq'ed last episode, she was remembering Weller being her starting point, her echo when she was fresh and new and having panic attacks every episode. Maybe she should give in and have another one so that he can do the hand-on-the-heart-and-breathe thing and they can bond like that again.

I'm liking how they're using the memory flashes to quickly get us up to speed on people's emotional lives as well as to give Jane snippets of who she was. Jane remembering emotional moments tells us what she really wants, even if she won't admit it.

By Samantha Holloway

About the author

Samantha is a freelance writer, editor and book and TV reviewer. She's currently in gradschool and working on her first novel, and one day she'll rule to world. Or marry her TV. Whichever comes first. Follow! twitter.com/pirategirljack.